Apache Solr

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Solr
Solr logo
Developer(s) Apache Software Foundation
Stable release 3.5 / November 27, 2011; 3 months ago (2011-11-27)
Development status Active
Written in Java
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Search and index API
License Apache License 2.0
Website lucene.apache.org/solr/

Solr (pronounced as ['soʊlə],['səulɚ]) is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is highly scalable.[1]

Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy to use from virtually any programming language. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin architecture when more advanced customization is required.

Apache Lucene and Apache Solr are both produced by the same Apache Software Foundation development team since the two projects were merged in 2010. It is common to refer to the technology or products as Lucene/Solr or Solr/Lucene.

Contents

[edit] History

In 2004, Solr was created by Yonik Seeley at CNET Networks as an in-house project to add search capability for the company website. Yonik Seeley along with Grant Ingersoll and Erik Hatcher went on to launch Lucid Imagination, a company providing commercial support, consulting and training for Apache Solr search technologies.

In January 2006, CNET Networks decided to openly publish the source code by donating it to the Apache Software Foundation under the Lucene top-level project.[2] Like any new project at Apache Software Foundation it entered an incubation period which helped solve organizational, legal, and financial issues.

In January 2007, Solr graduated from incubation status and grew steadily with accumulated features thereby attracting a robust community of users, contributors, and committers. Although quite new as a public project, it is already used for several high-traffic websites.[3]

In September 2008, Solr 1.3 was released with many enhancements including distributed search capabilities and performance enhancements among many others.[4]

November 2009 saw the release of Solr 1.4 This version introduces enhancements in indexing, searching and faceting along with many other improvements such as Rich Document processing (PDF, Word, HTML), Search Results clustering based on Carrot2 and also improved database integration. The release also features many additional plug-ins.[5]

In March 2010, the Lucene and Solr projects merged. Separate downloads will continue, but the products are now jointly developed by a single set of committers.

[edit] Features

  • Uses the Lucene library for full-text search
  • Faceted navigation
  • Hit highlighting
  • Query language supports structured as well as textual search
  • JSON, XML, PHP, Ruby, Python, XSLT, Velocity and custom Java binary output formats over HTTP
  • HTML administration interface
  • Replication to other Solr servers - enables scaling QPS
  • Distributed Search through Sharding - enables scaling content volume
  • Search results clustering based on Carrot2
  • Extensible through plugins
  • Pluggable relevance - boost through formula
  • Caching
  • Embeddable in a Java Application

[edit] Community and future

Solr has an active development community, both individuals and companies, who contribute new features and bug fixes.

Some of the features available in version 3.1 (which was the first version after merging with Apache Lucene) are:

  • Geo-spatial search
  • Automated management of large clusters through ZooKeeper
  • More function queries
  • Field Collapsing [6]
  • A new auto-suggest component

[edit] See also

Portal icon Free software portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ What is Solr?
  2. ^ Source code that CNET is granting to the ASF for the Solr project
  3. ^ Public Websites that use Solr
  4. ^ Solr 1.3 Announcement
  5. ^ Solr 1.4 Announcement
  6. ^ Solr Result Grouping

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links
Top level projects
Jakarta Projects
Commons Projects
Lucene Projects
Hadoop Projects
Other projects
Incubator Projects
Apache Attic
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